Word: furness
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...seminar called Music 180 was 30 minutes into its dissection of Stravinsky's Sonata for Two Pianos when the door flew open and a 5-ft. 8½-in. whirlwind spun into the room, flung a fur coat onto a chair, affectionately pinched the cheek of Professor Leon Kirchner and subsided into a sitting position on the floor. It was "retired" Superconductor Leonard Bernstein, now 54, making his rounds at Harvard as the new Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry...
Among the fashion unconscious, particularly skiers under 25, Army fatigue jackets continue to be popular, but they are slowly losing ground to down-filled, fur-hooded Air Force parkas. For the young, faded Levis remain high-status legwear; not being waterproof, they advertise the wearer's confidence in his ability to stay on his feet. More sensible skiers give their jeans a once-over with Scotchguard to keep the water...
...that book has now been reproduced in facsimile with explanatory text. The epic tells of ancient kings of Persia, real and mythical, beset by devils and dynastic rivalries. The pictures are Persian miniatures, with details so fine that they had to be painted with brushes made from kitten fur and the tails of squirrels. A delight, an education and one of the year's best buys...
...mystifies with new angles until perspective exposes the banality of his subject. This is tinplate Godard, confusing instead of intellectually surprising. Take for instance, the scene of David's train arrival. He steps onto a deserted platform and confronts a raucously singing spike-heeled floozy who throws open her fur coat to reveal a chintzy Miss America costume. Then four creatures who look like skid row relics show up with battered horns and even more battered music. Not only is it imitative of Fellini, but it is totally irrelevant...
Manic as Samaras' "transformations" are, they still possess a system and a history; his subverted objects have a common ancestor in Meret Oppenheim's surrealist icon of 1936, the fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon. Yet they are not mere footnotes to Surrealism. Samaras has a way of undercutting, or predicting, his more "mainstream" contemporaries; in 1961, for instance, he laid 16 square textured tiles flat on the ground, four by four, as a sculpture. In the Whitney, it looks like a waggish parody of Carl Andre's floor pieces-until you remember Andre's sculptures...